In a number of textile operations, continuous textile material is produced having thickened individual portions woven therein in side-by-side relationship transversely of the material and in series longitudinally of the material and which are separated by a thinned portion extending longitudinally along generally the middle of the material and having thinned selvage edge portions extending along each longitudinal side edge of the material. This is particularly true in textile operations for producing terry towels in which the thickened portions are individual terry towels.
In the fabrication of individual articles, such as terry towels, from such woven textile material, the individual articles must be cut from the continuous length of textile material, along the longitudinally-extending thinned portion and along the transversely-extending thinned portions. In the case of terry towels and other articles, the originally woven selvage edges must be trimmed, folded into a hem and stitched and the cut edges must also be folded into hems and stitched to form desired end products.
Heretofore, these fabrication operations have been performed, for the most part, manually by an operator in separate trimming, splitting and hemming operations utilizing separate cutting, hem folding and stitching machines. As can be appreciated, these are time consuming, labor absorbing and expensive fabricating operations. While some automatic and semiautomatic machines have been proposed for increasing efficiency of these operations, these semiautomatic or automatic machines have not been commercially successful for many reasons including the inability to properly compensate for transverse movement of the continuous textile material when traveling through such semiautomatic or automatic machines so as to provide uniform stitched hems on all edges of the fabricated products.